It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Friday, May 29th.

On Monday, most of you have heard this, a white woman made a racially charged 911 call on a black male birdwatcher in Central Park

after he asked her to lease her dog.

In what has now become an infamous viral video taken by the birdwatcher,

the woman says, I'm going to tell them there's an African-American man threatening my life.

Now a new bill proposed in the New York State Senate would add the false reporting of a crime

to a list of charges eligible for hate crime status.

Joining me now is Brian Benjamin, co-sponsor of that bill, New York State Senator,

who represents Harlem, East Harlem, Upper West Side, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights.

That's the 30th State Senate District, for those of you keeping score.

Welcome back to WNYC, Senator Benjamin.

Thank you for coming on with us today.

Thank you, Brian.

It's a pleasure to be here with you.

And let's start on the bill,

per se. It would make it a hate crime to call the police on a black person when no crime had occurred.

How would that be determined? And what do you think the punishment should be?

So the way it would be determined, it would be in the court of law.

And, you know, that's important because I think one of the key issues that we're dealing with here, Brian,

you know, I think it's important to take a step back because I've been seeing a lot of comments about this bill.

You know, Christian Cooper represents, for some people, the essence of our problem, right? So he's someone who played by the rules, worked hard, went to the right schools. If you look at the video, his restraint is

...